Beyond Energy Efficiency: 5 TED Talks On Meeting Future Energy Needs

Though we officially declared "Data" to be our Valentine this year, we here at WegoWise are also big fans of energy efficiency. Consider it a 2014 Runner-Up. As far as this love for energy efficiency stretches however, we also recognize that we can't only respond to climate change by improving our built environment. That's where major innovation comes in. This Friday, we've hunted down five very awesome TED Talks on the theme of future energy needs that anyone working in energy efficiency (but really just everyone) should check out. Enjoy!

Twenty-seven minutes.Amory Lovins, Chairman and Chief Scientist at the Rocky Mountain Institue, has a plan to take the US off of oil and coal by 2050. He believes we can accomplish this through major energy innovation and without the help of Congress.

Seventeen minutes. Rob Hopkins is the founder of the Transition Movement, which aims to create societies independent of fossil fuels. In this TED talk, Hopkins explains how we should prepare for a world without oil.

Fifteen minutes. Donald Sadoway, a John F. Elliot Professor of Materials Chemistry at MIT, says the key to alternative energy is developing a storage mechanism. In this talk he presents his solution – a large-scale battery made out of earth-abundant elements and produced with simple manufacturing techniques.

Five minutes. In order to hit Al Gore's targets of 350ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we'll need to generate over 10 trillion watts of new, clean energy over the next thirty to forty years. The answer? According to Inventor Saul Griffith, it could rest in energy generated by kites. Very cool.